Protip: Swords suck against stone.

One of the things I absolutely love in these games is that you can pretty much guess what an enemy's weaknesses are by looking at them. Dude made of fire? Use ice. Dude made of ice? Use fire. Dude made of flesh? Use bleed.

Most people seem to understand this, but there's one other thing in these that I constantly see people having difficulty with and that is dudes made of rock or metal. Your swords, axes and spears won't really do much to these guys. But they do have a weakness: blunt weapons (IE Strike damage). The only stone guys in the game that don't really seem to follow this are the new Forge Golems, which have their own special weak point.

Things made of stone or metal include:

• Imps
• Gravebirds
• Radagon
• Every type of golem
• Iron Balls
• Every type of Marionette
• Divine Beasts (not easy to tell by visuals; but in the lore, the humans underneath are called "sculpted keepers" and if you look carefully, they have the same kind of stone-grey skin as other rock monsters)
• Crystellians (these guys are actually used as a tutorial for the advantages of Strike weaponry!)
• Iron Virgins (although their insides are still fleshy, so you can just bait them to open up and use slash or piercing weapons effectively too)
• Falling Star Beasts
• Graven Masses

And in addition to these: Skeletons or anything visibly showing bone (which is pretty much all undead/Those Who Live in Death as well as Astels). But they are also super weak to Holy damage.

So if you find yourself struggling against any of these types of enemies, just switch to a hammer of some kind for that encounter. Especially the grave birds in the Shadow Realm; strike damage makes these things not even a threat as even the smallest strike weapons keep them completely stun-locked.